Word: ganges
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...details too often come embedded in crude ironies: The Gangbusters radio show on the sound track while the gang sits in front of a bank planning a heist, the repeated close-ups of a quilt where the lovers first make love and on which the dead Bowie is finally carried out. Most objectionable is the embarrassing instance when a radio production of Romeo and Juliet is played during Bowie and Keetchie's first rendezvous and each of the three times they make love the voice of the narrator illogically returns with the same "Thus did Romeo and Juliet consummate their...
...incompleteness extends from the depiction of the world and the characters to the story itself. Bowie leaves his young lover one morning and shows up down the road in inexplicable possession of a sheriff's uniform and fake warrant to procure the release from prison of one of the gang...
...MORE THAN holes in the story, there is a sense of how much of the real lives of outlaws is absent, and how much of the society which is inseparable from their crimes. The gang encounters law-abiding citizens only accidentally, as when Bowie rams his new car into another vehicle, or in the course of the robberies which seem to be just strung out one after another...
...their jobs, and never seem to plan anything except at the curbside in front of the bank. But the law is incredibly incompetent, and it takes a series of the most human weaknesses--one of the robbers foolishly getting married under his real name, a friend of the gang selling out Bowie to get leniency for her imprisoned husband--to bring about their ends. Robbery here is a profession like any other, but more subject to the weaknesses of love and personal necessity, more professionally proud than other professions, because it gets in your blood, makes you rob finally...
...investigators, the robbery had all the earmarks of a macabre publicity stunt, staged principally to demonstrate that the S.L.A. has tightened its grip on the millionaire's daughter. The gang did not shoot out the cameras that recorded their moves and made certain that the witnesses knew that Tania-Patty was with them. Moreover, investigators have turned up no evidence that the terrorist organization was running short of cash. Said one federal law enforcement official: "The S.L.A. feeds on publicity, and its appetite...